And we were told we don't know what we're talking about.

There's a photograph of Al-Madar with Khalad that came into the possession of the Central Intelligence Agency.

In May 2001, there was a CIA official who had the chance to disclose to an FBI counterpart the relationship that they suspected between these two people.

And that information was never disclosed.

So the CIA analyst showed an FBI colleague a picture of Al-Madar, but didn't say the picture had been taken at a meeting with Khaled and didn't say that Al-Madar had a U.S. visa.

The Central Intelligence Agency lost the members of this meeting when they moved shortly after that from Malaysia to Bangkok, Thailand.

So this could have been a crucial opportunity for the agency to continue their surveillance of these men But the CIA lost the trail and then never notified the State Department or the FBI about these two suspected operatives for the next year and a half.

Amy Zegert.

Of note, as the recent national intelligence estimate on Iraq explained, these gains against al-Qaeda are a result of the synergy of actions by conventional forces to deny the terrorist sanctuary, intelligence surveillance and reconnaissance assets to find the enemy, and special operations elements to conduct targeted raids.

We had a 9-11 commission for a couple of reasons, and it may be hard to remember now, but it was a pretty controversial idea at the time, and it took a lot of work, mostly by John McCain, Senator John McCain at the time.

to forge that commission.

There was a sense that we needed to better understand what went wrong, that we needed that effort to be bipartisan, and that we needed to have that commission's efforts be public.

So even more than the 9-11 Commission final report, which was a national bestseller, quite remarkable for a government report.

The 9-11 Commission held public and televised hearings, and those hearings gripped the nation as we all walked through together what went wrong and how it went wrong.

because it was believed that we needed to learn the lessons fully of what led to an attack that we proved to be not properly prepared for, that we caught us off guard, and that we must, therefore, not allow this to happen again and it was a device that has been used in the past where you you know appoint these commissions and they conduct investigations and produce voluminous reports and lay blame and they tend to be bipartisan and to some extent non-controversial so that whatever whatever lessons they say we need to learn we then try to learn

It's easy, though, to look back and say, you know, we can trace the rise of bin Laden and we can trace the rise of al Qaeda.

Of note, as the recent national intelligence estimate on Iraq explained, these gains against al-Qaeda are a result of the synergy of actions by conventional forces to deny the terrorist sanctuary, intelligence surveillance and reconnaissance assets to find the enemy, and special operations elements to conduct targeted raids.

We had a 9-11 commission for a couple of reasons, and it may be hard to remember now, but it was a pretty controversial idea at the time, and it took a lot of work, mostly by John McCain, Senator John McCain at the time.

to forge that commission.

There was a sense that we needed to better understand what went wrong, that we needed that effort to be bipartisan, and that we needed to have that commission's efforts be public.

So even more than the 9-11 Commission final report, which was a national bestseller, quite remarkable for a government report.

The 9-11 Commission held public and televised hearings, and those hearings gripped the nation as we all walked through together what went wrong and how it went wrong.

That was a significant miss.

I think the American people saw the raw price of failure of intelligence organizational weaknesses.